The Books of Enoch, Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4

THE ASTRONOMICAL BOOK 9
(r^v aarpoXoyiav kol XaXSa'cKrjv evpeiv) who teaches the Phoenicians 'the
evolutions of the sun and of the moon and all other things' (rpoTrag rjXlov koI
aeX'qvTjg Kal ra dXXa Trdvra). In Egypt, he initiates the priests of Helioupolis
in astrology and in other sciences, revealing to them that 'the invention of
these (sciences) goes back to Enoch, and it was he who was the first to invent
astrology, not the Egyptians' {rriv §€ evpeaiv avr&v els Evcjx ava7r€/x77€tv, Kal
TOVTov €vp7]K€vaL T17V daTpoXoylaVj ovk Alyvrrriovs). The Greeks claim that
Atlas invented astrology, but Atlas is none other than Enoch; Enoch had
a son Methuselah, and he learned all these things through the angels of God:
"^EXXrjvas §€ Xlyeiv top ^rAavra evprjKevai darpoXoyiav^ elvai Se tov UlrXavra
Tov avTov Kal ^Eva>x' rod Se ^Evcbx yeveadai viov MadovadXav ov irdvTa
SC dyyeXojv Oeov yv&vai. At the end of this passage we must take it that
there is a clumsy abridgement, and that the last phrase refers to Enoch and
not to his son. Eupolemos thus gives us a concise summary of the Astronomical
Book of Enoch: an astrological treatise describing the path of the
sun and of the moon and other matters, learned by means of angelic
instruction, and passed on to Methuselah.
Given the undeniably Samaritan character of this narrative (the primordial
role of Abraham as against that assigned to Moses in the Judaean tradition;
the allusion to the temple of Argarizin named the mountain of the Most
High, § 5), an anonymous Samaritan source may be seen in it, the same source
as that from which the extract dSecFiroros of Praep. ev. ix. i8. 2 is derived,
which, moreover, is simply a resume of the first extract from Eupolemos.^
However, it seems to me more likely that Eupolemos used the Samaritan
work and copied it without great changes. The short extract is derived
directly from it, and it differs in at least one detail (Abraham's descent from
the Giants) from the text of Eupolemos. The Samaritan history used by the
latter may well date from fairly far back in the third century, since one of its
objectives was the exaltation of the temple of Gerizim, founded in the time
of Alexander.^
This first reference to the Astronomical Book of Enoch, a reference coming
from a Samaritan historian, obliges us to rethink the problem of the priestly
milieu in which our document was written. The invention of the calendar of
364 days, its application to Biblical chronology, and the composition of
the astronomical work attributed to Enoch could have been effected just as
^ ],Yveudenth?!,HellmistucheStttdieriylle^hQ Geschichtswerke, Breslau 1875, pp. 82-103,
I und 2: Alexander Polyhistor und die von ihm 207-8, 223-5.
erhaltene Reste juddischer und samaritanischer * Josephus, Ant. xii. 257-64.